Javascript on Glass, Smart Lights, Hardware Startups, MySQL at Scale

Mining the World’s Data by Selling Street Lights and Farm Drones (Quartz) — Depending on what kinds of sensors the light’s owners choose to install, Sensity’s fixtures can track everything from how much power the lights themselves are consuming to movement under the post, ambient light, and temperature. More sophisticated sensors can measure pollution levels, radiation, and particulate matter (for air quality levels). The fixtures can also support sound or video recording. Bring these lights onto city streets and you could isolate the precise location of a gunshot within seconds.

I joined the Glass Explorer Program and have started using Google Glass with a focus on finding medical uses for this type of wearable computing technology. While I believe it’s the analytics capabilities that will allow us to realize the value of health information technology, the convergence of hardware and software — combined with an explosion of wearable sensor technology — is providing powerful opportunities for some disruptive innovation in the health care marketplace and the practice of medicine.

“There’s lots of interest in Glass use by surgeons, EMTs, and nurses, for hands-free and real-time access to critical information. It’s justified. But there’s also been negative speculation about threats to patient privacy. What will patients think when they see their physician wearing Glass? In my opinion, it will become just another tool they associate with health care workers (less obtrusive than the head mirror that used to be a symbol of the medical profession). The bigger question should be, what will physicians and others think when they see a patient wearing Glass?”

I decided it was finally time to take the plunge and become a Glass Explorer and got my Google Glass just in time for the annual HIMSS conference to end. For those who have not yet seen Google Glass or don’t understand how the technology works, it is basically a computer strapped to your head in the form of a pair of glasses. It has a heads-up display, voice activation and a growing number of apps. Check out the Google Glass homepage to learn more. When you think about having all of the technology of a smartphone, and then some, incorporated into a pair of glasses, it boggles the mind as to the various use cases for health care. I want to outline just a few and then think about what other innovative possibilities this type of technology could bring to the industry. Read more…

Current wearable computing technology is just scratching the surface — the really interesting tech has yet to be invented.

In an interview at SXSW, Google’s Sundar Pichai said something about wearables that I’ve been waiting to hear. Wearables aren’t about Google Glass; they aren’t about smart watches; they’re much, much more, and these technologies are only scratching the surface.

I’ve tweaked Apple a couple of times for their inability to deliver a watch, despite years of leaks and rumors. I suspect that products from competitors have forced them to pivot a few times, rethinking and delaying their product. But the bottom line is that I don’t care; I don’t wear a watch, haven’t for a long time, and I’m not about to start. Just not interested.

I’m more interested in Glass, but I’ve been amazed at how few people are listening to what Google has said about it: it’s an experiment. It’s not the endpoint, not the product. Given the excitement it has produced, Google would be foolish not to sell it. But really: it’s ugly, it’s a prototype, it’s a mockup. Five years from now, will we all be walking around with Google Glass hanging from designer frames? I doubt it. And I bet Pichai, Brin, and Page doubt it, too. It’s an experiment; it will show us what’s interesting, and point toward what to build next. It’s not the end result. Read more…

The Death and Life of Great Internet Cities — “The sense that you were given some space on the Internet, and allowed to do anything you wanted to in that space, it’s completely gone from these new social sites,” said Scott. “Like prisoners, or livestock, or anybody locked in institution, I am sure the residents of these new places don’t even notice the walls anymore.”

What You’re Not Supposed To Do With Google Glass (Esquire) — Maybe I can put these interruptions to good use. I once read that in ancient Rome, when a general came home victorious, they’d throw him a triumphal parade. But there was always a slave who walked behind the general, whispering in his ear to keep him humble. “You are mortal,” the slave would say. I’ve always wanted a modern nonslave version of this — a way to remind myself to keep perspective. And Glass seemed the first gadget that would allow me to do that. In the morning, I schedule a series of messages to e-mail myself throughout the day. “You are mortal.” “You are going to die someday.” “Stop being a selfish bastard and think about others.” (via BoingBoing)

What We Know and Don’t Know — That highly controlled approach creates the misconception that fossils come out of the ground with labels attached. Or worse, that discovery comes from cloaked geniuses instead of open discussion. We’re hoping to combat these misconceptions by pursuing an open approach. This is today’s evolutionary science, not the science of fifty years ago We’re here sharing science. […] Science isn’t the answers, science is the process. Open science in paleoanthropology.

A chat with Amanda Parkes, Ivan Poupyrev, and Hayes Raffle.

At our Sci Foo Camp this past summer, Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas, and I were joined by guests Amanda Parkes, a professor in the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, and CTO at algae biofuels company Bodega Algae and fashion technology company Skinteractive Studio; Ivan Poupyrev, principle research scientist at Disney Research, who leads an interaction research team; and Hayes Raffle, an interaction designer at Google [X] working on Project Glass. Our discussion covered a wide range of topics, from scalable sensors to tactile design to synthetic biology to haptic design to why technology isn’t a threat but rather is essential for human survival.

Poupyrev explains the concept behind the Touché sensor is that we need to figure out how to make the entire world interactive, developing a single sensor that can be scalable to any situation — finding a universal solution that can adapt to multiple uses. That’s what Touché is, Poupyrev says: “a sensing technology that can dynamically adapt to multiple objects and can sense interaction with water, with everyday objects, with tables, with surfaces, the human body, plants, cats, birds, whatever you want.” (2:50 mark)

The Page-Fault Weird Machine: Lessons in Instruction-less Computation (Usenix) — video, audio, and text of a paper that’ll make your head hurt. We demonstrate a Turing-complete execution environment driven solely by the IA32 architecture’s interrupt handling and memory translation tables, in which the processor is trapped in a series of page faults and double faults, without ever successfully dispatching any instructions. LOLWUT?!

Fanout Architectures, In-Browser Emulation, Paean to Programmability, and Social Hardware

JS MESS — porting the stunning MESS ultimate emulator to Javascript. Interesting challenges like Chrome currently has a hardcoded limit of 32,767 variables, and Firefox has a point at which it hits the CTRL-FUCKIT button and drops the mic.

Go Ahead, Mess with Texas Instruments (The Atlantic) — School typically assumes that answers fall neatly into categories of “right” and “wrong.” As a conventional tool for computing “right” answers, calculators often legitimize this idea; the calculator solves problems, gives answers. But once an endorsed, conventional calculator becomes a subversive, programmable computer it destabilizes this polarity. Programming undermines the distinction between “right” and “wrong” by emphasizing the fluidity between the two. In programming, there is no “right” answer. Sure, a program might not compile or run, but making it offers multiple pathways to success, many of which are only discovered through a series of generative failures. Programming does not reify “rightness;” instead, it orients the programmer toward intentional reading, debugging, and refining of language to ensure clarity.

When A Spouse Puts On Google Glass (NY Times) — Google Glass made me realize how comparably social mobile phones are. […] People gather around phones to watch YouTube videos or look at a funny tweet together or jointly analyze a text from a friend. With Glass, there was no such sharing.